This originally appeared on the Web site, American Association of School Administrators. The original link is no longer active but it was a guest column that appeared in June 2000.
Absolutely the Best Dentist
BY JOHN S. TAYLOR
My dentist is great! He sends me reminders so I don't forget checkups. He uses the latest techniques based on research. He never hurts me. And, at 52, I've still got all my teeth.
When I ran into him the other day, I was eager to see if he'd heard about the state’s new initiative to help him succeed in his work. I knew he'd think it was great.
"Did you hear about the new state program to measure the effectiveness of dentists with their young patients?" I said.
"No," he responded. "How will they do that?"
"It's quite simple," I said. "They will just count the number of cavities each patient has at age 10, 14 and 18 and average that to determine a dentist's rating. Dentists will be rated as Excellent, Good, Average, Below Average and Unsatisfactory. That way parents will know which are the best dentists. It will also encourage the less effective dentists to get better," I said. "Poor dentists who don’t improve could lose their licenses to practice in South Carolina."
"That's terrible," he said.
"That's not a good attitude," I told him. "Don't you think we should try to improve children's dental health in this state?"
"Sure I do," he said, "but that's not a fair way to determine who is practicing good dentistry."
"Why not?" I said. "It makes perfect sense to me."
"Well, it's so obvious," he said. "Don't you see that dentists don’t all work with the same clientele? So much depends on things we can’t control.
"For example," he went on, "I work in a rural area with a high percentage of patients from deprived homes, while some of my colleagues work in upper-middle-class neighborhoods. Many of the parents I work with don’t bring their children to see me until there is some kind of problem and I don't get to do much preventive work.
"Also, many of the parents I serve have allowed their kids to consume way too much candy and soda from an early age, unlike more-educated parents who understand the relationship between sugar and decay.
"To top it all off," he continued, "so many of my clients have well water that is untreated and has no fluoride in it. Do you have any idea how much difference early use of fluoride can make?"
On the Defensive
"It sounds like you're making excuses," I said. I couldn't believe my dentist would be so defensive. He does a great job.
"I am not!" he protested. "My best patients are as good as anyone's, my work is as good as anyone's, but my average cavity count is going to be higher than a lot of other dentists because I chose to work where I am needed most."
"Don't get touchy," I said.
"Touchy?" he said. His face had turned the color of a beet. From the way he was clenching and unclenching his jaws, I was afraid he was going to damage his teeth.
"Try furious," he raged. "In a system like this, I will end up being rated average, below average or worse. My more-educated patients who see these ratings may believe this so-called state rating actually is a measure of my ability and proficiency as a dentist. They may leave me, and I’ll be left with only the most needy patients. And my cavity average score will get even worse. On top of that, how will I attract good dental hygienists and other excellent dentists to my practice if it is labeled below average?"
"I think you are overreacting," I said, turning to some printed material about the new statewide accountability program. "'Complaining, excuse making and stonewalling won't improve dental health.' That was straight from a leading member of the DOC."
"What's the DOC?" my dentist asked.
"It's the Dental Oversight Committee, a group made up mostly of laypersons to ensure dentistry in this state gets improved," I explained.
"Spare me," he said. "I can't believe this. Reasonable people won’t buy it," he said with hope.
Help at Hand
The program still sounded reasonable to me, so I asked, "How else would you measure good dentistry?"
"Come watch me work," he said. "Observe my processes."
"That's too complicated and time consuming," I said. "Cavities are the bottom line, and you can't argue with the bottom line. It's an absolute measure."
"That's what I'm afraid my parents and prospective patients will think. This can't be happening," he said.
"Now, now," I said, "don't despair. The state will help you."
"How?" he asked.
"If you're rated poorly, they'll send a dentist who is rated excellent to help straighten you out," I said brightly.
"You mean," he said, "they'll send a dentist with a wealthy clientele to show me how to work on severe juvenile dental problems with which I have probably had much more experience? Big help."
"There you go again." I said. "You aren't acting professionally at all."
"You don't get it," he said. "Doing this would be like grading schools and teachers on an average score on a test of children’s progress without regard to influences outside the school, the home, the community served and stuff like that. Why would they do something so unfair to dentists? No one would ever think of doing that to schools."
Legislative Rescue
I just shook my head sadly, but he had started to brighten. "I'm going to write my representatives and senator," he said. "I'll use the school analogy--surely they will see the point."
He walked off with that look of hope mixed with fear and suppressed anger--the same sort of look I’ve seen in the mirror a lot lately.
John Taylor is superintendent of the Lancaster County School District, P.O. Box 130, Lancaster, S.C. 29721. E-mail: jtaylor@mail.lcsd.k12.sc.us
Showing posts with label school policies. Show all posts
Showing posts with label school policies. Show all posts
Friday, February 22, 2002
Monday, June 25, 2001
NYC School Censors
John Elfrank-Dana wrote:
I hope everyone is having a good time at NECC.
The new BOE policy for publishing web pages here in NYC is the following.
1. All schools (1100 of them) are supposed to submit their web sites (even those of us who have been hosting independently for years), and their teachers’ sites to the Board of Ed. server.
2. A district censor is supposed to review all the material of each site and have it moved to the public viewing area, assuming it’s in compliance with the new acceptable use policy, which includes no links to sites that have a commercial advertisement. The censors will move the content along at “their earliest possible convenience.”
3. No chats or asynchronous bulletin boards allowed!
Anyone who has ever web mastered an active school or class web site that functions as a real communications hub for timely information and class dialogue should be equally dismayed as me.
The policy will go in force Sept. 1. They won’t even tell us how much disk space we will have. They also refuse to support FrontPage extensions (many of us use them to create active pages and discussions forums for our classes).
One practical outcome of this policy: The
Board’s AUP is in Adobe Acrobat, but I can’t link for our visitors to download the Acrobat Reader because Adobe has ads on its site!! 2. Our e-books collection, which VATEA funded for thousands of dollars, won’t work because it requires a web server on location.
3. No discussion boards for class discussions (protected or not).
This policy was conceived by Board of Ed. lawyers and techs who are not now nor have been educators. It’s another slap in the face to teachers as professionals. It’s like the doctors under managed care who have lost control of their practice. For teachers who use the Internet as an instructional tool, this is very heavy-handed policy.
Are other districts implementing similar policies? If so, how has it been going? What organizations, if any, have an interest in this kind of policy? What rights, if any, do teachers have to control the content of their instruction? Is this an intrusion into teacher practice?
Regards,
John Elfrank-Dana
Web Master/ Social Studies Teacher
Murry Bergtraum High School
http://www.bergtraum.org/ushistory
john@elfrank.org
I hope everyone is having a good time at NECC.
The new BOE policy for publishing web pages here in NYC is the following.
1. All schools (1100 of them) are supposed to submit their web sites (even those of us who have been hosting independently for years), and their teachers’ sites to the Board of Ed. server.
2. A district censor is supposed to review all the material of each site and have it moved to the public viewing area, assuming it’s in compliance with the new acceptable use policy, which includes no links to sites that have a commercial advertisement. The censors will move the content along at “their earliest possible convenience.”
3. No chats or asynchronous bulletin boards allowed!
Anyone who has ever web mastered an active school or class web site that functions as a real communications hub for timely information and class dialogue should be equally dismayed as me.
The policy will go in force Sept. 1. They won’t even tell us how much disk space we will have. They also refuse to support FrontPage extensions (many of us use them to create active pages and discussions forums for our classes).
One practical outcome of this policy: The
Board’s AUP is in Adobe Acrobat, but I can’t link for our visitors to download the Acrobat Reader because Adobe has ads on its site!! 2. Our e-books collection, which VATEA funded for thousands of dollars, won’t work because it requires a web server on location.
3. No discussion boards for class discussions (protected or not).
This policy was conceived by Board of Ed. lawyers and techs who are not now nor have been educators. It’s another slap in the face to teachers as professionals. It’s like the doctors under managed care who have lost control of their practice. For teachers who use the Internet as an instructional tool, this is very heavy-handed policy.
Are other districts implementing similar policies? If so, how has it been going? What organizations, if any, have an interest in this kind of policy? What rights, if any, do teachers have to control the content of their instruction? Is this an intrusion into teacher practice?
Regards,
John Elfrank-Dana
Web Master/ Social Studies Teacher
Murry Bergtraum High School
http://www.bergtraum.org/ushistory
john@elfrank.org
Thursday, June 21, 2001
What Students Remember
Several years ago, a former student came to me during Back to School night. He asked if I remembered him. This young bearded adult resembled no twelve-year-old I had taught and I asked his name. This I did remember. That night he told me that he'll always remember my class. Since he had failed my class in spite of all the strategies I tried, I was flabbergasted to hear this.
Out of curiosity, I asked him what it was that he remembered about my class. He said it was the hero/monster book project assigned in my 7th grade class. He told me he still had the bound copy of his group's book and that it was one thing that he really enjoyed in middle school.
That year I had divided each class into groups of four. Each group was responsible for working together to create a book which would have an original hero story that included a monster. Students were given instructions to include specific elements in their story after we had finished reading "Beowulf." Besides the illustrations and main story, other elements included book jacket information, table of contents, and an interview with the monster's mother.
This project, truly an activity which reflected the critical thinking that MSPAP is supposed to encourage, had captured this former student's imagination. I'm sorry to say that I no longer have time in the curriculum to include this project. It takes too long and I would not have time to do the required unit assessments and writing prompt practice for their writing folders. And I certainly wouldn't have the time to grade all that and manage to get the student books assembled. Besides, my copy allotment would probably run out with so many book copies for the students.
Albert Einstein said that "imagination is more important than knowledge" but those who power the educational system policy must not have discovered this yet. Could it be they lack the imagination to envision what the education of our children could be?
The buzz word these days is "assessment" and this word is now in bold print with Bush's leadership. Awakened policy makers realize that our students are not prepared with the necessary skills for successful living in the real world. The answer is to test, analyze and then re-test ad infinitum. The thinking is that if we hammer away enough at assessment hard enough, then students' test scores will go up and their education will have been successful.
And it isn't limited to test, analyze and retest. Between the tests, students are taught the language of the test and the best strategies to do well in the test. During this time they take multiple practice tests. All in the name of good education.
The tests rely heavily on "real-life" situations and the skills needed to cope with them. Don't get me wrong. This type of activity has many merits. However, things are so weighted toward this kind of thinking that we have left out time for kid things, the kind of things that encourage and reward the growth of imagination.
Have you ever wondered why Harry Potter has been so successful? Kids hunger for what is missing in a diet lacking imagination.
Harry Potter fills a void in children's lives that has been fostered by our culture and educational system. Our media culture leaves nothing to the imagination. They are entertained rather than becoming the entertainers. Our way of doing things in the world today provides instant feedback. Kids are used to instant gratification. They are not prepared to accept that education doesn't necessarily provide instant feedback. It can be a long and difficult process. If we can't give them instant feedback because of the nature of the learning process couldn't we at least provide an environment which fosters imagination. Using the imagination is fun.
More students than ever are dropping out of school. We complain about the lack of student motivation. I'm with the students. I understand because I wouldn't be motivated by the hope of increasing MSPAP scores. After all, students do not see the results of their test and it has no impact on grades and anything else they see as relevant.
For sure, test scores are going up. We are successfully preparing our students to understand the language of the test and to be good test takers. But will this prove that we are giving our children a good education?
Out of curiosity, I asked him what it was that he remembered about my class. He said it was the hero/monster book project assigned in my 7th grade class. He told me he still had the bound copy of his group's book and that it was one thing that he really enjoyed in middle school.
That year I had divided each class into groups of four. Each group was responsible for working together to create a book which would have an original hero story that included a monster. Students were given instructions to include specific elements in their story after we had finished reading "Beowulf." Besides the illustrations and main story, other elements included book jacket information, table of contents, and an interview with the monster's mother.
This project, truly an activity which reflected the critical thinking that MSPAP is supposed to encourage, had captured this former student's imagination. I'm sorry to say that I no longer have time in the curriculum to include this project. It takes too long and I would not have time to do the required unit assessments and writing prompt practice for their writing folders. And I certainly wouldn't have the time to grade all that and manage to get the student books assembled. Besides, my copy allotment would probably run out with so many book copies for the students.
Albert Einstein said that "imagination is more important than knowledge" but those who power the educational system policy must not have discovered this yet. Could it be they lack the imagination to envision what the education of our children could be?
The buzz word these days is "assessment" and this word is now in bold print with Bush's leadership. Awakened policy makers realize that our students are not prepared with the necessary skills for successful living in the real world. The answer is to test, analyze and then re-test ad infinitum. The thinking is that if we hammer away enough at assessment hard enough, then students' test scores will go up and their education will have been successful.
And it isn't limited to test, analyze and retest. Between the tests, students are taught the language of the test and the best strategies to do well in the test. During this time they take multiple practice tests. All in the name of good education.
The tests rely heavily on "real-life" situations and the skills needed to cope with them. Don't get me wrong. This type of activity has many merits. However, things are so weighted toward this kind of thinking that we have left out time for kid things, the kind of things that encourage and reward the growth of imagination.
Have you ever wondered why Harry Potter has been so successful? Kids hunger for what is missing in a diet lacking imagination.
Harry Potter fills a void in children's lives that has been fostered by our culture and educational system. Our media culture leaves nothing to the imagination. They are entertained rather than becoming the entertainers. Our way of doing things in the world today provides instant feedback. Kids are used to instant gratification. They are not prepared to accept that education doesn't necessarily provide instant feedback. It can be a long and difficult process. If we can't give them instant feedback because of the nature of the learning process couldn't we at least provide an environment which fosters imagination. Using the imagination is fun.
More students than ever are dropping out of school. We complain about the lack of student motivation. I'm with the students. I understand because I wouldn't be motivated by the hope of increasing MSPAP scores. After all, students do not see the results of their test and it has no impact on grades and anything else they see as relevant.
For sure, test scores are going up. We are successfully preparing our students to understand the language of the test and to be good test takers. But will this prove that we are giving our children a good education?
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